Might&Magic X Legacy was crippled by devs on 32 bit OS

January 28th, 2014, 02:11

While I understand the feeling of "bait and switch", reading the developers' explanation posted by Couch makes it fairly clear to me the choice that they made. For whatever reason (poor programming, insufficient optimization, Archibold's Revenge), the game can get unstable with 4MB of RAM. They had a choice- allow the crashes and get crucified for releasing a buggy game or prevent the instability by throttling on 32bit systems and get crucified for going backwards from the demo. I imagine the goal would be to piss off the least amount of people and therefore generate the minimum amount of nerdrage. Since 32bit early adopters are a subset of all 32bit gamers that purchased or will purchase MMX, the number of pissed off players must be less under the decision they made. Now, one could say that pissing off the "core fanbase" carries more weight than pissing off "everybody", but the other side of that coin is that the core fans are more likely to be forgiving.

Seems to me that they made the best selection from two bad choices.

— Sorry. No pearls of wisdom in this oyster.
Dallas Cowboys: Great Season! / / Detroit Red Wings: Another rollercoaster this year?

Originally Posted by dteowner
For whatever reason (poor programming, insufficient optimization, Archibold's Revenge), the game can get unstable with 4MB of RAM.

I'm assuming you meant GB not MB, but the issue is actually most likely the 2GB per-process limit.

If you compile a 32-bit app with the "large address aware" flag (which they did for M&M X, just checked), then it can use (normally) a max of 2GB RAM on a 32-bit OS, and a max of 4GB RAM on a 64-bit OS.

The reason I say "normally" above is that there are kernel flags you can change in your NT boot configuration on a 32-bit OS that will raise that 2GB limit to 3GB.

It'd probably have been a lot better if they'd still allowed 32-bit users to use the blocked settings, but printed some strong warnings about it if they tried to pick them. There isn't much reason to prevent people who know what they're doing from overriding things.

Originally Posted by Stingray
It'd probably have been a lot better if they'd still allowed 32-bit users to use the blocked settings, but printed some strong warnings about it if they tried to pick them. There isn't much reason to prevent people who know what they're doing from overriding things.

Sounds like a good idea. If it were me, though, I would be posting that warning every time the game was started with that configuration. Otherwise people will set it, ignore the game for a month, forget the setting, come back, crash, and bother the support people.

The "don't buy early" access conclusion has come up a couple of times in this thread. I actually think it raises a really good question that also touched on the "we can only expect so much from a small developer" aspect as well.

What do you think of the difference between the Blackguards Early Access and the MMX Early Access experiences? When I was reading through the reviews for MMX on steam a lot of people gave it negative reviews because they said the devs were unresponsive. The first act of the game was put out there and there were no further updates or improvements, just the big optimization changes when the game was released (I did not play through all of the game when it was in early access, I bought it in the last week, so if this is not how it really happened, please correct me).

Blackguards on the other hand continued to put out chapter after chapter on early access right up until the point they released the game a day early. They seemed very involved and responsive to the community. I have not seen any complaints about the way that game was released.

I think early access can be good, but it really has to be done correctly. MMX clearly did not do it well where as I think Blackguards used the medium to improve their game and connect with their community.

What is the difference in sizes of these developers? I have the impressions they are similar, but please correct me if I'm way off.

For what it's worth, I'm really enjoying MMX, but I can fully understand where Gokyabgu and others are coming from.

Originally Posted by Alaric
What do you think of the difference between the Blackguards Early Access and the MMX Early Access experiences? When I was reading through the reviews for MMX on steam a lot of people gave it negative reviews because they said the devs were unresponsive. The first act of the game was put out there and there were no further updates or improvements, just the big optimization changes when the game was released (I did not play through all of the game when it was in early access, I bought it in the last week, so if this is not how it really happened, please correct me)..

This is simply not true. Not sure where you're getting your info, but you should stop getting it from there. Just take a look at the past couple months of newsbits here at the Watch. The MMX devs have done an excellent job communicating and the early release got no less than 3 updates between its initial release and the full version's release. I personally updated 3 times, and I think I actually missed one.

If that's what people are saying on Steam, either they're talking out their collective asses or they're trolls that can't be bothered with the truth.

— Sorry. No pearls of wisdom in this oyster.
Dallas Cowboys: Great Season! / / Detroit Red Wings: Another rollercoaster this year?

So, I bought the game and, while there's no denying the nostalgia and charm of the gameplay, the technical side of it is an absolute joke. This is the only game in recent memory that causes my EVGA 670 to heat up to the point that I can hear its fan throttle up. All this for a tile-based game. And yes, V-sync is enabled.

Case in point, noone should be defending the technical ineptitude of this title. You can still love it for trying to bring back proper M&M, but its technical sloppiness is quite apparent.

Originally Posted by dteowner
This is simply not true. Not sure where you're getting your info, but you should stop getting it from there. Just take a look at the past couple months of newsbits here at the Watch. The MMX devs have done an excellent job communicating and the early release got no less than 3 updates between its initial release and the full version's release. I personally updated 3 times, and I think I actually missed one.

If that's what people are saying on Steam, either they're talking out their collective asses or they're trolls that can't be bothered with the truth.

Originally Posted by Stingray
I'm assuming you meant GB not MB, but the issue is actually most likely the 2GB per-process limit.

If you compile a 32-bit app with the "large address aware" flag (which they did for M&M X, just checked), then it can use (normally) a max of 2GB RAM on a 32-bit OS, and a max of 4GB RAM on a 64-bit OS.

The reason I say "normally" above is that there are kernel flags you can change in your NT boot configuration on a 32-bit OS that will raise that 2GB limit to 3GB.

It'd probably have been a lot better if they'd still allowed 32-bit users to use the blocked settings, but printed some strong warnings about it if they tried to pick them. There isn't much reason to prevent people who know what they're doing from overriding things.

That's not how it works, 32 bit windows has a 4GB limit of memory addresses. That's different than physical system ram. Memory addresses include system ram as well as video ram and a few other things I forget, it's been a while. System ram is limited to about 2.2GB + some video ram etc.

Also a 64 bit OS is not double a 32 bit OS, it's the the powers that double thus:

32 bit= 2 to the 32nd power = 4096 MB or 4 GB

64 bit OS = 2 to the 64th power which equals 16EB (exabytes) which is roughly 17,000,000,000GB. However big that is. Again thats memory address, not system memory.

You are 100% correct, serves me right for not fully reading your post. I saw the 2GB limit for 32 bit and 4GB limit for 64 bit and jumped to a conclusion.

In my defense I just got done explaining the memory size to my brother the other day because he thought 64 bit memory would just be double 32 bit. I thought you were saying the same thing because I didn't pay attention.